Join AA-ISP's Founder & Chairman, Bob Perkins, as he hosts an in-depth discussion on the past, present and future state of the Inside Sales industry and profession. Bob will be joined by practitioners and thought leaders, Lori Harmon, Alex Turner, and Wanda Pansky, who will share their own experiences and insights into the power of Inside Sales as we prepare for 2016 and beyond.

Keynote Panel:
- Bob Perkins, Founder & Chairman, AA-ISP
- Lori Harmon, VP of Sales, Contrast Security
- Alex Turner, Director of Sales Development, Wrike
- Wandy Pansky, Director Sales Development, Intacct

Yes, Mark Kosoglow, Outreach's Vice President of Sales, is saying this at a gathering of Inside Sales professionals. It is based on more than his own experiences. It is an idea born of conversations he has daily with sales leaders all over the world. The pressure to grow sales is suffocating. The expectations of boards, shareholders, and executives have become unrealistic due to the revenue growth of outliers like Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. Mark will show you why what we are asking sales people to do is impossible, and the tangible ways to empower your sales team past those challenges.

Every year, it’s the same: Sales leaders look at quotas, hiring plans, and compensation and determine what needs to change. What other questions should sales leaders be asking themselves to improve results?

Join long-time sales veteran, Gabe Larsen, Momentum Director for InsideSales.com, as he shares three trends in 2016 that you should have on your radar:

• Sales Structure Specialization – Most companies get it. You need Sales Development Reps to optimize your sales structure. But what else do you need? How else should you be specializing your sales organizations and, more importantly, how can you effectively manage it?
• Predictive Analytics - Let’s face it, one of the reasons we haven’t seen the promised productivity of predictive analytics is because it lacks a prescriptive element. But this is the year we’ll crack the code.
• Platform Solutions - Sales teams will maximize the value of their CRMs with fully integrated sales acceleration platforms, rather than a messy mix of point solutions.

What will it take to succeed as a Sales Leader in 2016? Today, over 50% of forecasted deals slip or never close at all. Customers are also more knowledgeable than ever, by some estimates nearly 75% through the research and buying stages before they ever talk to one of your sellers. Salespeople who can anticipate customer needs will be more effective during the sales cycle, and Sales Leaders who manage with insight will achieve better business results.

In this compelling session, Barry Trailer, Chief Research Officer and Co-Founder of CSO Insights (a division of MHI Global), and Michael Schultz, VP of Marketing for ClearSlide, discuss new proprietary research that reveals key sales trends every Sales Leader needs to consider and address in their go-forward plans. In addition, they’ll share critical insights and actionable recommendations for Sales Leaders to help improve performance in 2016 (and beyond).

Over the course of the past year, you've probably seen many sales opportunities stagnate at a particular stage of your sales funnel, but how many of those opportunities did you move back a stage? This critical diagnostic question and several others can help you determine just how "healthy" your funnel really is.

As we approach the end of Q1 in a new selling year, ask yourself: “Do I have a measure of my overall funnel health?” If you are like most sales professionals, sales managers or sales executives, your honest answer is "I don't know." However, if you're in that group, you do know that too many deals have stalled, too few deals enter the top of the funnel, and too few deals close without some form of discounting or giveaway.

What if you were to find out that the answer to these frustrations and the answer to "funnel fitness" really isn't that complicated? What if you had five simple questions that would help you determine your funnel fitness?

The best tools are critical, but they are not enough. All the tools in the world won’t really change the fact that most people on your team will never perform like your top performers.

To deliver the results you want, you need more of the right people.

Up till now, there has never been a way to reliably solve the people problem holding back most sales teams. Today, there is a new way to dramatically increase the odds of getting the people part right. It means looking at people in a fundamentally different way. It means tapping into a new category of information that reveals why your top people massively outperform the rest.

In this session, Jamie Schneiderman, CEO of Clearfit, the leader in performance insights, will show you how today's sales leaders are using WHY data to get the critical missing information they need to build killer sales teams.

You'll learn how these leaders are:

Consistently finding other top salespeople
Minimizing wasted training dollars and coaching time
Investing only in the people who are built to succeed
Delivering significantly better sales results

Discover the new data empowering world-class sales teams.

Jim Eberlin, Founder and CEO of TopOPPS, leads a research-based presentation identifying what best-in-class sales organizations do to hit their numbers. He will address barriers to accurate forecasting and the business pressures behind every sales meeting for executives and sales leaders.

Sales Quarterly Business Reviews can be a great opportunity for setting sales strategy and aligning the sales team for the next quarter. Join Jim Eberlin, Founder and CEO of TopOPPS, to learn how to make QBRs effective in accountability, priorities and a data-driven process.

The “sharing economy,” with perhaps the best known example being Uber, is fundamentally changing the way the world works. Uber’s transformative business model brings down the cost of transportation and creates a better overall experience for consumers through better utilization of drivers to match consumer demand. The Uber business model is similar to the shift we are seeing in Inside Sales. Buyers want control and convenience whether they are looking for a ride to the airport or purchasing a software product for their business. In this session, Josh Evans, the SVP of Sales at Velocify, shares his own personal experience with the Uber brand and draws parallels to lessons that Inside Sales teams can leverage to better optimize their own sales processes to meet evolving buyer expectations.

Across the board, inside sales reps say they want more coaching from leadership. However, faced with other pressures, leaders often put coaching on the back burner – with costly ramifications. In addition to lower rep performance, lack of and poor coaching can result in job dissatisfaction, turnover, and a slower sales cycle.

In this session, LiveHive CEO Suresh Balasubramanian will share three ways how top performing organizations are applying real-time analytics to the coaching process. By increasing visibility into prospect interactions, rep activities, and activity levels, analytics are helping sales leaders review rep performance and coach reps more objectively and effectively.

In this session, Ashley Becker, Senior Director of Member Services for AA-ISP, will discuss the wide variety of resources and services available through your AA-ISP membership. In addition, she will share recent updates on association activities and events.

Sales organizations must focus salespeople on the right prospect, at the right time, with the right message. Blind, shotgun cold calling campaigns just don’t work anymore. In this session with Craig Klein, CEO and Founder of SalesNexus.com, you’ll learn how your organization can know which customers and prospects are ready for sales engagement now with the technology you have today.

• Identify actions customers take that tell us what they need next, and automating getting it to them.
• Measure what customers do online
• Capture what customers tell salespeople, and synthesizing all of this information together
• Automatically put the right message in front of each customer, both via salespeople and marketing messages.

Result: Salespeople call prospects at the right time with the right message, based on each customer’s actions and don’t waste time calling prospects that aren’t ready. The system automatically nurtures those that aren’t ready and leads them forward.

Are all of your negotiations about price? All customer-supplier relationships revolve around money. But the price negotiation doesn’t have to leave you feeling taken advantage of. Come learn the best strategies for negotiating price and be ready the next time your customer asks for a discount.

In this session, you'll learn how to:

• Positively manage a buyers price target
• Use tradeoffs to maintaining your product’s or service’s value
• And how to always preserve a profit in each sale.

This is a highly interactive session. Bring your price negotiations to “map” out on my Money Map to gain instant clarity on your very next price negotiation. As a bonus for attending, you’ll get a link to the Managing Money chapter from Jeanette Nyden's manual New Rules for Negotiating: A Manual for Sales Professionals.

As leaders you may struggle with finding, developing, and promoting great sales reps and sales managers. Join us for this panel session where we'll talk about strategies for more women in these roles and what actual ROI can be to support this effort. What are innovative companies doing to build a stronger bench?

This session is open to all sales leaders - male and female - and to individual contributors looking for an idea of the skills they need to develop to be more successful in their sales team. Leaders will leave with ideas on how their environment and hiring team can be helping or hurting in this effort.

Host: Lori Richardson, President, WOMEN Sales Pros

Panelists:
Marilyn Nagel, Co-Founder, NQuotient
Jeanette Nyden, Negotiator, Sound Partnership Strategies Inc.
Bridget Gleason, Vice President of Corporate Sales, Sumo Logic
Leslie Gay, Director, WW Sales Programs at Hewlett Packard Enterprise

The one thing that is consistent in top sales performers across all industries is that they are mentally tough. They purposefully execute strategies to keep themselves focused, productive and motivated. They know how to brush off the negative effects of a bad call and put their brain back into a peak performance zone at the start of the next call. They learn to focus their attention on the things they can control and to never waste energy by complaining about the things they can’t. Research from sport psychology and sales training proves that every one of these mental toughness skills can be mastered by anyone which means every one of your salespeople can dramatically improve their sales performance.

In this session with Bruce Lewolt, Founder of BrainX, you will learn how other companies have used Mental Toughness Training to produce an across the board increase in sales performance. You will also learn about a new AA-ISP Mental Toughness Coaching certification program for sales managers and the Mental Toughness Training Courses for Salespeople.

Join Ken Jisser, Co-founder of ReplyStream, for a session that will help show you how to drive 2X-3X productivity from your sales function. A checklist of 10 steps to build a high velocity sales team that any manager can deploy at any company, on any budget.

We all want to coach more, and more effectively, but how can we efficiently focus on having the most effective coaching conversations with those reps who need the most help? And how can we measure improvement immediately and reliably without waiting for whole sales cycles to play out?

Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell, will use real CRM call disposition data plus recordings of actual sales conversations to share a practical method of using dispositions to drive (and measure) coaching efficiency and effectiveness. Come prepared to “be the coach” as we get real about improving rep performance one step at a time.

Emergency fill in: James Hannoosh, Director of Sales, Major Accounts, ZoomInfo

Every SDR knows the feeling. The end of the month is quickly approaching and they haven’t come close to hitting their quota. This is when frustration and burnout start to kick in as the monotony of the day-to-day grind drags on. Join Peter Weyman, Chief Revenue Officer at ZoomInfo, to learn how to avoid SDR burnout and accelerate your revenue growth by:

• Hiring with the future in mind - how to build a bench of your future superstars
• Setting the stage for success: Empowering your SDRs with the right tools (data, sales automation, etc.)
• Acknowledging success and establishing the right career trajectory, goals and expectations, and following through with the promise

Inside salespeople are the Alfa Kids on the sales block. They Rule! For the first time in history, they are equipped with the shiniest tools, the fastest technologies and the most sophisticated systems. So why are only 58% of them hitting quota and 74% of them suffer from low sales confidence?
This interactive session explores why salespeople have fallen off the wagon when it comes to being engaged and taking ownership of their deals, territories and themselves. We will break through motivational tactics to wake up change-resistant salespeople and help them hit their revenue targets in 2016.

- The 7 change-resistant indicators the prove you might be frozen in time
- How to create the change you want to see and let go of those behaviors that will get in the way.
- How todays salespeople need to invigorate and innovate or die

The best salespeople are genuinely curious. They make progress because of their choices and decisions, which come from asking smart questions. This session with long-time Inside Sales expert Ralph Barsi will touch on three key areas requiring excellent questions from sales and Inside Sales reps.

How good are the questions YOU ask?

Does your sales team struggle to engage prospects in meaningful dialogue? How often does a hot lead, qualified opportunity, or forecasted deal suddenly go dark when (for example) an unknown stakeholder appears from nowhere? It happens every day – in every sales organization.

According to a 2014 IDC social buying study, 75 percent of B2B buyers now use social media to learn about vendors and their offerings. Still, most selling organizations have yet to activate social channels to better listen, engage, and differentiate themselves with potential buyers. Research from CEB, CSO Insights, and others suggests as few as 5 percent of companies focus on "trigger events" to better find, engage, accelerate, and close business.

In this session, Kevin O'Nell, CEO of PeopleLinx, will discuss how sales performance can be significantly increased using a "Guided Selling" approach that leverages prescriptive technology. Defining "trigger events" from your CRM, social networks, email, calendar, and other sources of data to deliver real-time, in-context guidance – personalized to the individual rep – is a game changer. The explosion of social business networks has made this a reality. Why are you waiting?